Home Office “MR” consultation #2. It’s not MR!

The Home Office has finally revealed its thinking in this low-profile month long consultation from the 4^th November until 30^th November 2023.

The consultation makes proposals that, even according to the Home Office’s own impact statement, will deliver no improvement to safeguarding and importantly for the Government it seems, no discernible increase in referrals to the statutory agencies. The Home Office claims its proposal is “mandatory reporting” when in fact it is nothing of the sort. The claim eases the Government’s ability to sell it to a subject naïve public and assert it has fulfilled one of the key recommendations of the IICSA public inquiry.

Our submission to the consultation, redacted of personal details, is available here in .pdf format.

Our submission to the consultation, redacted of personal details, is available here in .docx.

Here is an extract from our submission:

As a consequence, it appears that government is prepared to leave abused children to their fate rather than take action that would lead to more crimes of child sexual abuse coming to the attention of the authorities.

This Home Office approach to safeguarding children is strikingly similar to this recent allegation made in the Covid inquiry:

Here is a highlighted note which shows the difference between IICSA’s lamentable recommendation 13, for what it asserted was mandatory reporting, and the dreadful proposal made by the Home Office.